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to say how faithful and full a resume you have given of my notions on
the moral sense in the "Pall Mall," and to make a few extenuating or
explanatory remarks. (242/1. "What is called the question of the moral
sense is really two: how the moral faculty is acquired, and how it is
regulated. Why do we obey conscience or feel pain in disobeying it? And
why does conscience prescribe one kind of action and condemn another
kind? To put it more technically, there is the question of the
subjective existence of conscience, and there is the question of its
objective prescriptions. First, why do I think it obligatory to do my
duty? Second, why do I think it my duty to do this and not do
that? Although, however, the second question ought to be treated
independently, for reasons which we shall presently suggest, the
historical answer to it, or the various grounds on which men have
identified certain sorts of conduct with duty, rather than conduct of
the opposite sorts, throws light on the other question of the conditions
of growth of the idea of duty as a sovereign and imperial director.
Mr. Darwin seems to us not to have perfectly recognised the logical
separation between the two sides of the moral sense question. For
example, he says (i. 97) that 'philosophers of the derivative school of
morals formerly assumed that the foundation of morality lay in a form of
Selfishness; but more recently in the Greatest Happiness principle.'
But Mr. Mill, to whom Mr. Darwin refers, has expressly shown that the
Greatest Happiness principle is a STANDARD, and not a FOUNDATION, and
that its validity as a standard of right and wrong action is just as
tenable by one who believes the moral sense to be innate, as by one who
holds that it is acquired. He says distinctly that the social feelings
of mankind form 'the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian
morality.' So far from holding the Greatest Happiness principle to
be the foundation of morality, he would describe it as the forming
principle of the superstructure of which the social feelings of
mankind are the foundation. Between Mr. Darwin and utilitarians, as
utilitarians, there is no such quarrel as he would appear to suppose.
The narrowest utilitarian could say little more than Mr. Darwin says
(ii. 393): 'As all men desire their own happiness, praise or blame is
bestowed on actions and motives according as they tend to this end;
and, as happiness is an essential part of the general good, the Greatest
Happiness principle INDIRECTLY serves as a NEARLY safe standard of right
and wrong.' It is perhaps not impertinent to suspect that the faltering
adverbs which we have printed in italics indicate no more than the
reluctance of a half-conscious convert to pure utilitarianism. In
another place (i. 98) he admits that 'as all wish for happiness, the
Greatest Happiness principle will have become a most important secondary
guide and object, the social instincts, including sympathy, always
serving as the primary impulse and guide.' This is just what Mr. Mill
says, only instead of calling the principle a secondary guide, he would
call it a standard, to distinguish it from the social impulse, in which,
as much as Mr. Darwin, he recognises the base and foundation."--"Pall
Mall Gazette," April 12th, 1871.) How the mistake which I have made in
speaking of greatest happiness as the foundation of morals arose, is
utterly unintelligible to me: any time during the last several years
I should have laughed such an idea to scorn. Mr. Lecky never made a
greater blunder, and your kindness has made you let me off too easily.
(242/2. In the first edition of the "Descent of Man," I., page 97, Mr.
Lecky is quoted as one of those who assumed that the "foundation
of morality lay in a form of selfishness; but more recently in the
'greatest happiness' principle." Mr. Lecky's name is omitted in this
connection in the second edition, page 120. In this edition Mr. Darwin
makes it clearer that he attaches most importance to the social instinct
as the "primary impulse and guide.") With respect to Mr. Mill, nothing
would have pleased me more than to have relied on his great authority
with respect to the social instincts, but the sentence which I quote at
[Volume I.] page 71 ("if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are
not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural")
seems to me somewhat contradictory with the other words which I quote,
so that I did not know what to think; more especially as he says so very
little about the social instincts. When I speak of intellectual activity
as the secondary basis of conscience, I meant in my own mind secondary
in period of development; but no one could be expected to understand so
great an ellipse. With reference to your last sentence, do you not think
that man might have retrograded in his parental, marriage, and other
instincts without having retrograded in his social instincts? and I
do not think that there is any evidence that man ever existed as a
non-social animal. I must add that I have been very glad to read your
remarks on the supposed case of the hive-bee: it affords an amusing
contrast with what Miss Cobbe has written in the "Theological Review."
(242/3. Mr. Darwin says ("Descent of Man" Edition I., Volume I., page
73; Edition II., page 99), "that if men lived like bees our unmarried
females would think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers." Miss Cobbe
remarks on this "that the principles of social duty would be reversed"
("Theological Review," April 1872). Mr. Morley, on the other hand, says
of Darwin's assertion, that it is "as reassuring as the most absolute
of moralists could desire. For it is tantamount to saying that the
foundations of morality, the distinctions of right and wrong, are deeply
laid in the very conditions of social existence; that there is in face
of these conditions a positive and definite difference between the moral
and the immoral, the virtuous and the vicious, the right and the wrong,
in the actions of individuals partaking of that social existence.")
Undoubtedly the great principle of acting for the good of all the
members of the same community, and therefore the good of the species,
would still have held sovereign sway.
LETTER 243. TO J.D. HOOKER.
(243/1. Sir Joseph Hooker wrote (August 5th, 1871) to Darwin about Lord
Kelvin's Presidential Address at the Edinburgh meeting of the British
Association: "It seems to me to be very able indeed; and what a good
notion it gives of the gigantic achievement of mathematicians and
physicists!--it really made one giddy to read of them. I do not think
Huxley will thank him for his reference to him as a positive unbeliever
in spontaneous generation--these mathematicians do not seem to me to
distinguish between un-belief and a-belief. I know no other name for the
state of mind that is produced under the term scepticism. I had no idea
before that pure Mathematics had achieved such wonders in practical
science. The |